Is there really a difference between web hosts?

With prices for web hosting ranging from zero to a whole lot more, depending on your needs, it’s okay to ask if there is really a difference between these hosting providers.

It can be hard to tell when you type your site name into a browser and it pulls up fine. Do you really need to care where your site is hosted? Isn’t that just an invisible commodity? Why would you pay one provider $50/month and another $2/month?

When your site is designed poorly, you can probably tell even if you don’t have a flair for design. It’s hard to navigate, it looks unbalanced, maybe it’s just plain ugly. It’s not very intuitive. It doesn’t have a call to action, etc. etc.

When you are hosted cheaply on an over worked server, you may not notice it, but google will. And many of your site visitors will. And the worst part, many would-be site visitors will never see your site and never have the chance to be engaged by it because of the way you are hosted. It’s that important.

Shared hosting, where your site is one of many on a shared server, is fine as long as it is managed appropriately. Site “uptime” and “load speed” are both critical. Check the stats for those when you are evaluating hosting providers. Read the reviews. Not just the top few but several pages of them.

Accessible customer support is key. Make sure your host has it. Caching technology to increase your sites load speed is key. Make sure your host has that too.